That would be Frontier: First Encounters. It had slightly better graphics, a bit different user interface and a pretty forgettable plot. Not that big of an improvement. On the plus side you could get a Thargoid ship...

I liked Elite II loads, more than the original in fact. I wish the trading system and various missions had been more dynamic though. The new project sounds interesting; good luck to them.

I didn't actually realise there'd been an Elite III.

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Limited by the time it was produced.. it is a miracle to see with what ressources programmers back then had to work to create games.. any modern cell phone has way more storage and computing power that the biggest home system you could afford in the late 80s/early 90s.

Yet we got awesome games we could spend dozens of hours with, sometimes even more.

I am so looking forward to this if it gets made (and i'm pretty sure the Kickstarter will be a success).. together with the ressurection of Wing Commander by Chris Robert's i'm one happy gamer right now.

I've been missing the space genre quite a bit, it's a good it's coming back again. The X games are ok if you like the trading aspect. Combat is ok but it feels too small being set in kilometre-sized sectors with planets and moons you can't land on, explore or make use of. They get better but I like a full-size realistic galaxy that you can explore every object within. I'm sure Frontier can find a number of ways to make all the extra space more useful - like long quests to far off systems to find special artefacts and derelict systems. Rescue operations etc.

I liked Elite II loads, more than the original in fact. I wish the trading system and various missions had been more dynamic though. The new project sounds interesting; good luck to them.

I didn't actually realise there'd been an Elite III.

Click to expand...

Limited by the time it was produced.. it is a miracle to see with what ressources programmers back then had to work to create games...

Click to expand...

I remember having to futz around with one of the memory files in order to get Elite II to run on my PC when it came out. Something about only running in higher memory or something; can't really remember. I do remember getting it as a Christmas (or maybe birthday) present and not being able to run it until a few days later when I could ask someone technologically minded how to alter the file. These days, one would just do an internet search and find the answer immediately...

I remember having to futz around with one of the memory files in order to get Elite II to run on my PC when it came out. Something about only running in higher memory or something; can't really remember. I do remember getting it as a Christmas (or maybe birthday) present and not being able to run it until a few days later when I could ask someone technologically minded how to alter the file. These days, one would just do an internet search and find the answer immediately...

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Yeah, those old games needed a bit technical wizardry, sometimes. Games with memory requirements of 580k of conventional memory or under were easy to get running. Play games that required more and you usually ran into difficulties because you also had to load mouse driver, sound card driver and later, cd-rom driver into memory. And of course you only had 640k to play with. (Thanks, Bill "640k will be enough" Gates)

Of course, later came games that required expanded/extended memory. That meant that you also needed to load a memory manager program, which, of course, meant less conventional memory available for the game.

To get around these limits, you usually loaded as much of the hardware drivers as possible to upper memory blocks (area between 640-1024k in memory space) and/or get drivers that consumed memory as little as possible. All this meant manually editing config.sys and autoexec.bat files in the operating system. Modern kids have it so easy.

I can clearly remember the time when i had worn down my parents to buy me a RAM upgrade to increase it to a whopping 1 MB of RAM.. plugging it in felt like real engineer work for a kid back then

God i played Elite religiously back then.. one of the best games ever. I'm currently very happy that so many legendary games get reboots or sequels.. XCom is a very good remake of the classic game (and damn hard on the advanced levels), now we get the inofficial Wing Commander Online game called Star Citizen and Elite is on its way too.

Together with the new Sim City and semi regular new Civilization games i'm set for a long time!

Yeah, those old games needed a bit technical wizardry, sometimes. Games with memory requirements of 580k of conventional memory or under were easy to get running. Play games that required more and you usually ran into difficulties because you also had to load mouse driver, sound card driver and later, cd-rom driver into memory. And of course you only had 640k to play with. (Thanks, Bill "640k will be enough" Gates)

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I remember being really proud of my final DOS config that was getting I think 615K or so by then end.

Yeah, those old games needed a bit technical wizardry, sometimes. Games with memory requirements of 580k of conventional memory or under were easy to get running. Play games that required more and you usually ran into difficulties because you also had to load mouse driver, sound card driver and later, cd-rom driver into memory. And of course you only had 640k to play with. (Thanks, Bill "640k will be enough" Gates)

Click to expand...

I remember being really proud of my final DOS config that was getting I think 615K or so by then end.

Click to expand...

I used to play Heart of China, which required at least 581Kb of conventional memory. For the longest time I loaded, reloaded, reordered, reconfigured, and threatened to throw my computer out the window, but I finally got the results I wanted. Man, this takes me way back. Sierra games, Star Trek: TNG still going on strong on the air, playing "Away Team" in our backyard with my friends... magical memories.

Played it extensively on the BBC micro back in the day, and revisited it briefly as Frontier: Elite II in '93, but what time I have left is too previous to devote to yet another revisit, no matter how good the eye candy is. I'll pass.

It's looking likely that this will get funded now. There's less than £180k to raise over the next six days which is £30k a day and it's been getting about that for the last couple of weeks. And if things ramp up towards the end like with other kickstarters then this should be a done deal... hopefully...